Some people manage all right by doing this serially rather than in parallel. That's a good strategy for anyone, since you may discover that what seemed like a good idea at the time actually wasn't. (Yes, we're rediscovering self awareness and time binding, basic qualities humans are supposed to develop in infancy.) I'm sure using both is important but I won't venture a guess about the optimal mixture, which must vary by environment.
Not being able to think about your own thinking at all seems crippling; alas, far too many demonstrations of that disability fill the internet.
]]>That's okay though: one of the things I'm pretty sure about is that we want to live and work in neurodiverse communities.
One example is a hospital pharmacy. You WANT hospital pharmacists who focus exclusively on doing their work very well with as low an error rate as you can get (even though this makes them vulnerable in other areas). The reason is simple: they're one of the major error correction workers in the hospital, and when they screw up, people get the wrong drugs. The pharmacists here don't actually make the drugs, they check the orders against both their own knowledge, what the doctors and nurses asked for, and against the patient's history. As OGH has noted, pharmacists don't sit there imagining what could go wrong, they just do their jobs.
In one pharmacy I know pretty well, they've also got a med safety officer. She's a horrible line pharmacist, because she is very good at imagining what could go wrong. As a result, she's always double-checking herself, and so she's very slow at getting work done, highly stressed, and not the other pharmacists' favorite person to work with on the rare occasions when she just checks orders like they do. Her role is to deal with when the pharmacists screw up (which is rarely) to make sure it doesn't happen again by instituting new training and review procedures. I'm rather like the med safety officer personally, and I had to explain to one of the pharmacists who work with her why she's so important to the work they do, even though she can be really annoying and is far less efficient than they are.
That's the point of neurodiversity: a pharmacy full of people who are always monitoring themselves is going to be inefficient. A pharmacy full of focused workers who don't doubt themselves will kill people occasionally. You need a mix of both to make the place safe and efficient.
]]>Romilar brand codeine cough syrup used to give me a split screen sensation, like half my mental awareness was business as everyday usual while the other half was eavesdropping from the next room. Might have been a signal lag latency problem from delay or rerouting between one brain module and another, causing my stream of consciousness to temporarily bifurcate. Which could help understand what the ancient Hindu meditation practitioners were talking about, with their concept of atman as the observer. They might have been on to a universal emergent property of human brains, which is to experience selfhood through the constant reflexive observation of ones own thoughts, usually automatic and below conscious awareness, but capable of being monkeyed with by drugs or yogic practice for whatever reason. Or schizoid disorders, hearing voices. My own take on it is that everyone has an inner zombie whose state of awareness is like a dog or a horse, they track what's happening but don't really comprehend cause and effect. They're always present but just passively taking everything in, under ordinary circumstances. Only when higher cognitive function is disabled, like during sleep, do they command the main stream of mental activity such that you get dream sequences where you flip a light switch but the lamp doesn't go on, the zombie just doesn't follow what the connection is. Then in extreme old age that's pretty much all that's left except for occasional lucid moments. So be good to your inner zombie, it might end up carrying you. Feed it positive thoughts, so that when everything comes spewing back out uncontrolled, it won't be quite as unpleasant for others. Or for the hundreds of millions of citizens you were elected to serve.
]]>There's nothing "zombie" about it. Zombies (and I'm a purist, so I go with the original Haitian definition, not the movie version), are people who have been robbed of their soul, e.g. their free will. Meditation is actually the opposite of that. To the degree that free will is possible, it helps restore it by teaching you how to let go of impulses that would otherwise control you.
]]>Regarding zombies... A colleague returned from his Christmas break to tell of being in a queue at a cash machine with his (closely controlled) dog, when a pit bull-type dog under inadequate control attacked. After the struggle to get the attacker to release its jaws from his dog’s face, and after having talked to the other dog’s owner, he noted yesterday that he couldn’t remember the owner’s face, and probably wouldn’t recognise him; his full focus had been on the primary threat. Witness unreliability is a known problem; another is that many people are a bit slow, or even aren’t any good in a crisis*. They freeze, and switch their brains off. Plenty of stories of aircraft accidents where people are trying to find their belongings rather than get off the plane, or passenger ferries where they walked past lockers full of flotation aids.
** Dog recovered physically, less stitches and a £750 vet bill... release eventually achieved by grabbing attacker’s front legs and separating them sideways until it released its jaws in pain, but before they broke.
* I was on a workplace first aider course with a colleague, when he fainted with a few seconds’ warning (as in, “I’m feeling faint”, slump), from his chair in the semicircle, during the lesson. I managed to catch his head (he wasn’t even sitting next to me), and the instructor and I laid him out on the floor to recover, while everyone else just sat and watched. For the first few seconds, I assumed that this was a sneaky instructor and a training exercise; it wasn’t, but it was good training for all.
]]>Very true, but with many important nuances that vary among meditation schools of thought (e.g., zen vs. vipasana vs. mindfulness). I've done enough meditation (mindfulness and zazen) to have a visceral sense of how it works, and I've become much better at detecting when something (e.g,. frustration) is interfering with my thought processes and with communication. I've been very grateful for that self-knowledge many times.
But I'm not an expert. A friend who is an expert (decades of practice) has an astounding ability to remain calm and focused in situations that would have me frothing at the mouth and throwing things. He's not perfect, but he's so much better than I am at these situations because he can see the real issue that underlies the surface issue much faster and more clearly than I can. One person = anecdata, but I've known many other meditators over the years, and they all seem capable of remarkable calmness and insight. (I've also known meditators who are better at avoiding issues than dealing with them, so the practice is by no means a panacea.)
Heteromeles: "Zombies (and I'm a purist, so I go with the original Haitian definition, not the movie version), are people who have been robbed of their soul"
One thing you learn as an editor (my profession) is the distinction between denotation (what the dictionary says) and connotation (what the world beieves). One can appeal to a higher authority (the dictionary), but one must recognize that the rest of the world will keep using the word "wrongly" according to that authority. If you want to communicate clearly with them, you need to work with the connotation, not the denotation. In your case, I'd distinguish between "zombie" (George Romero et al.) and "Haitian zombie". Simple way to clarify the difference and educate people, without risking communication failure.
]]>It'll be an arms race (as outlined by Charlie in the OP), but yes, we should be/must be striving towards such a goal, IMO. It might even be possible to achieve in some societies, e.g. with assistance from a (hypothetical) robust, rapidly-responsive, pro-active non-captured regulatory apparatus. I'm imagining other alternatives as well, e.g. technology-aided anti-consumerism in a distributed, overtly law-abiding utopian subsociety, and assuming a society not unreasonably friendly to consumerism. (Or I suppose The Midas Plague but need a post-scarcity-society first) Or religions - existence proof - the Amish; not suggesting that they be emulated (doesn't scale), just that it must be possible because it happens.
]]>First, a distinction: there are mantras intended as prayers (a more mystical thing) and mantras intended solely as meditation aids (a more practical thing). I recuse myself from the mystical aspects of mantras, as I don't have any experience with them.
That being said, I don't think there's necessarily any such thing as an optimal mantra or an optimum that varies between people. The practical (non-prayer) form of a mantra is nothing more than a device for helping you focus your attention on the act of meditation. When I first tried meditation as a teen (largely self-taught, but with a bit of research), I found that a drone (the clichéd "ohm") worked very well for me. By focusing on it along with my breathing, I found it much easier to separate myself from all the thoughts clamoring for my attention and just pay attention to my breathing and state of mind.
More recently, I took a very brief refresher course in a different style (zazen) meditation, at a Japanese Buddhist temple in Kyoto. No mantra was recommended or required, and I did not use one. Even without the mantra, I achieved a greatly improved sense of being in the moment, which is a very interesting sensation for someone who is accustomed to being constantly distracted by thoughts of past (where I've just come from) and future (where I'm about to go).
My understanding from a couple pros I know (both from the vipasana tradition) is that really skilled meditators don't require or use a mantra other than for religious purposes.
]]>Remarkable restraint.
I've been attacked by dogs a few times, and defended my dogs from attack a couple of times.
I don't go into a dog fight with the intention of minimising harm to the attacking dog. I go in with the intention of making it dead as quickly as possible and with no injuries to me or mine. I try to give off an aura that humans are the most dangerous animal to have ever walked the face of the Earth and now you've annoyed one. Interestingly dogs seem to pick that up pretty quickly and I've never actually killed, or even as far as I'm aware seriously injured a dog. (Come to think of it, maybe I did kill one, I didn't stick around to find out. I got a good kick to the side of the neck while I was riding past at about 60 km/h. (It came onto the road and leapt at me) Enough to bruise my foot through a motorcycle boot. I never saw that dog again, despite it being on my post run. It had hospitalised another postie but it was owned by a judge and the police wouldn't do anything about it.)
However sure as anything, I'd not be figuring out how to get a dog that had locked onto my dog how to release. I'm sure that it would be pretty easy to release the jaw after I'd broken its neck or back. Holding the pressure to "before they broke" wouldn't be happening.
]]>If these systems are currently capable of being trained on human reaction to optimise for gross reactions, like the desire to make a large purchase, might they be also used to automate the search for subtler emotional tones in the creation of art? Faces, scenery, lighting, cutting; how long until iMovie has an 'anomie' slider?
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